(re)sounding the call for the evolution of legal education
In this March 2005 post, I discussed how today’s law schools are missing the opportunity to teach key skills practitioners need to build career success and satisfaction. One of the featured articles (now requiring access by registration) discussed a path to curriculum reform championed by Pace Law School’s Dean Stephen J. Friedman. In that piece, he proposed that newly-minted lawyers will be productive sooner if they’re educated in a trade school mode – that is, if they’re trained to see how the various areas of law they study interface in a given legal matter. Friedman seconds his own call for change in this new commentary entitled A Practical Manifesto for Legal Education. Launching from the premise that law schools are really “professional schools,” he states that “legal education must be brought into closer alignment with the need of law students to hit the ground running when they begin to practice law.” According to Friedman, the current state of misalignment stems from a stunted “dialogue between legal academia and practicing lawyers on precisely how to go about creating effective new lawyers.” The misfit is only exacerbated by the reign of the billable hour and rampant client dissatisfaction with underwriting legal training. With these factors in mind, Friedman previews what his decided, but not “radical,” transformation of the legal academy might look like: “Examining legal education through the prism of practice areas,” law schools will embrace a practice-oriented curriculum that allows students to build an “integrated combination of skills, knowledge and substantive law in one broad area -- such as litigation or corporate transactions.” I agree that the time is ripe for law schools to reconsider how to meet the real-world needs of their students. But, as I've expressed before, I believe that any curriculum reform will fall short unless it promotes the dual aims of teaching tradework and building the human relations skills vital to optimal lawyering.
Arnie,
Your post has a false premise--that there are skills practitioners can acquire to build career success and satisfaction. The World is Flat (and most of the better lawyers will soon be from India); skills have nothing to do with making competition less destructive of the human condition.
Being one of the few who left law teaching to become a full time lawyer, without doubt, I would urge law schools to even resist clinical education. Do the math 15 hours a week in one semester of clinical work is less than three weeks of on the job training.
Legal education should be changed solely by using technology to drive down the costs. No one has yet explained to me why every school still has a torts teacher and a contracts teacher, etc. Webcasts should come from Harvard, Yale, and local schools should concentrate on legal writing and reasearch, group study, and more frequent exams.